And here are my holiday snaps*

It
turns out that a full-scale theatre detox – an entire month of
seeing next to nothing – is simultaneously healthy prep for the
annual Edinburgh fringe binge and a major mistake: within 24 hours of
seeing work again my brain was fizzing from the excess of stimulation
and I couldn't talk only gabble delirium. The thing that stood next
to nothing was Hadestown, a show I've wanted to see for a good five
years, ever since I interviewed Anais Mitchell and added her to my
pantheon of living-by-their-own-truth role-model women. For the not
yet obsessed: Mitchell is a folk singer who created a wonky,
sawdust-strewn rewrite of Orpheus and Eurydice to be performed as a
community opera with her neighbours in semi-rural Vermont; later she
released the songs as an album featuring Justin Vernon (Bon Iver) (be
still my heart); and now she's worked with the Team's director,
Rachel Chavkin, to transform it into an off-Broadway musical. I love
the Hadestown album to distraction. I paid $99 to see the production
at the New York Theater Workshop, more than I've spent on a single
piece of theatre in years. I went girded for disappointment. But oh.
OH.

In an
ideal world I'd have seen this with Vernon singing, or at the very
least Taylor Mac, who joined Chavkin for R&D work on the show.
But it didn't matter that this isn't an ideal world, because
Hadestown is a thing of such perfection that it transcends its
performers: lyrically, musically, but also narratively and
politically. I say this with authority, having witnessed Martin
Carthy sing the role of Hades for a gig performance at Union Chapel
apparently drunk, missing his cues and forgetting the words. And
anyway, Chavkin's performers were pretty much phenomenal. Plus,
Mitchell herself worked with Chavkin (and dramaturg Ken Cerniglia) on
the additional material, and her composer collaborator Michael
Chorney is a vital presence in the theatre band, so hyper-sensitivity
to stage change had its balms.

The
bare bones of the story are this: Hadestown opens with pragmatic
Eurydice grilling her poet-musician boyfriend about how exactly they
might survive if they got married. He spins her a golden yarn about
nature providing, as though they were hunter-gatherers in a time of
Eden; but the fact is, they live in (Depression-era) America, where
“times are hard and getting harder all the time”. When she hears
the lonesome whistle of the underground train to Hadestown blow,
she's lethally tempted: its tycoon despot offers work, money, warmth
and security in place of harsh precarity. Orpheus, recognising that
she's lost her soul (and, it's implied, her body) to capitalist
exploitation, attempts to save her – but Hades, altogether too
cognisant of the weakness of humans, inevitably thwarts them.

That's
the skeleton: what makes Hadestown exquisite are the feathers and
jewels with which Mitchell, Chorney and now Chavkin adorn it. In some
ways that's the wrong metaphor, as attested by Chavkin's rough-hewn
aesthetic: working with designer Rachel Huack, she stripped the
theatre back to a wooden floor, installed a homestead amphitheatre of
mismatched wooden chairs (a smart nod to the pioneers and Puritans of
America's past, and its constitutional commitment to rugged
individualism), and set the action in an open circle overshadowed by
the gnarled branches of a single, wintry tree. The sparseness
brightened the gleam of Mitchell's peripheral characters: bold and
swaggering Persephone (exquisitely played by TEAM regular Amber Grey,
crackling as she twisted her body into jagged origami); the
glittering chorus of Fates, watchful, teasing, never judgemental; and
Hermes, gossamer on record but in Chris Sullivan's performance
stomping and robust, a railroad man with a touch of Charon in his
crepuscular gaze. Like Chorney's orchestration, a tapestry of
American sounds weaving jazz, country and more, Michael Krass's
costumes criss-crossed the decades: 1950s bobby sox and dirndl for
Eurydice, a 1930s embroidered slip for Persephone, patchwork silks
and leathers for the Fates. Everything on stage felt thrown together
yet intimately cohesive, simple in a way that belied its complexity.

For
Orpheus, love is simple, and so is life; he's a sentimental romantic,
but he's also, as Hermes so tenderly puts it, an artist who “sees
the world as it could be, not how it is”. Mitchell and Chavkin are
unsparing in puncturing that romanticism while committing absolutely
to its promise: Hadestown really is hell, overheated, overlit,
over-policed and over-provided, and while Mitchell had plenty of
gated communities to draw on when she conceived the notion of a
workforce committed to constructing the wall that separates its own
wealth from its fear of the poverty and jealous need beyond, that
imagery has all the more bite with Trump's Mexico manifesto (and, on
our side, the appalling Calais action) poisoning the air. Any hint of
a middle-class or left-wing sneer at the “stupid” working classes
(the criticism levied as much at Brexit voters as Trump enthusiasts)
who unthinkingly follow-the-leader is quashed by Mitchell's clear
differentiation between people and structures. People are moulded by
the context that contains them: Hades himself is built by the system
he builds, his humanity and happiness compromised by it. In
Eurydice's shoes, the Fates demand, what might we all do the same?
When Orpheus looks back, Mitchell and Chavkin open the possibility
that it's not an innate emotional weakness at fault but some trick of
structural oppression that ensures even the most strenuous of
opponents will ultimately be crushed. This is what makes Hadestown
emotionally devastating: not the fact that Orpheus loses Eurydice, as
the myth declares he must, but the deeper loss of the collective
human soul to capitalist inequality, from which – no matter how
hard we might try to stride into a different future – there seems
to be no escape.

But
there is. Orpheus is still singing, and dreaming of a better future.
We know this, because Mitchell wrote Hadestown.

Laura
Veirs shares the left-wing politics of Anais Mitchell, and her
earnestness of expression, too; but whereas Mitchell's solo work is
more straightforwardly me-and-my-guitar folk, Veirs' collaborations
with producer Tucker Martine pack the musical references of Hadestown
into erudite pop songs. It took me a while to click with her, but
since 2010's July Flame I've been a devoted fan. We played Warp and
Weft as we drove across Indiana, and it reminded me of listening to
PJ Harvey's Let England Shake while driving through the Cotswolds,
those placid rolling hills suddenly muddied and seething with the
ghosts of dead soldiers, insurrectionists, men. Indiana is basically
flat; I'd guess it's desolate in winter, but it's verdant in early
August, field after field of thriving maize. Veirs' circumspect songs
made that landscape churn with alarm at what America has become and
what it's built on:

How
can it be so cold out here in America

Everybody
is packing heat in America

Training
their barrels on the city streets in America

Every
bad man finds his peace in America

In
America

No
shootings were reported while we were in the country, but I did read
of the Black Lives Matter action shutting down the M4 back home and
glowed with admiration and a sense of possibility. Ever since Theresa
May glided into her premiership that's what I've wanted to do: just
sit in the middle of roads, bringing cities to a standstill. Instead
I sat in our hired car for hour upon hour, contemplating the spray
contraption that looms over so many field, maybe distributing a fine
mist of water but more likely showers of pesticide, noting how many
billboards advertise litigation lawyers, wondering how houses that
don't have garden fences around them can suggest so much hostility
towards the unknown stranger. Laura Veirs sang and her words ploughed
the land, churning to the surface its lack of care.

Later
we played Anna Meredith's Varmints and I thought again that it's my
favourite album released so far this year.

I'm
honestly embarrassed by how much I love the National. Looking at them
in the film of A Lot of Sorrow, installed at the Art Institute of
Chicago, I was overwhelmed again by shame, that these middle-aged
white guys, with their suits and wedding rings and thinning hair, are
so capable of turning me to putty. And yes, I'm ashamed of my
superficiality in judging them by appearance: me, a middle-aged white
woman, with my own wedding ring, constantly reminded by the queer and
feminist art with which I align myself of how essentially straight I
am; ashamed, too, of the craven lingering adolescent desire to be
different, other, strange. My embarrassment at loving the National is
a nugget of a more general shame I feel just being me.

But
maybe the National are embarrassed in a similar way; or rather, my
feeling is that its members, especially Aaron and Bryce Dessner, use
this middle-of-the-road rock behemoth to finance all the different,
other, strange art they want to make. (Thus Orpheus entered
Hadestown, proud even in his submission.) A Lot of Sorrow is a
fascinating intersection of those two impulses: a continuous
performance of the song Sorrow, from their 2010 album High Violet,
over and over, non-stop, for six hours, in a white-walled room in the
Museum of Modern Art, New York. I saw at most 16 minutes of it on
film, and not even consecutively, but it was enough to get my pulse
racing at the intricacy of detail: the jitter of exhausted fingers,
the crack of voice, the decision to switch to playing guitar with a
violin bow, the pause to gather resources, the slipped note, the brow
that furrows with effort, the snatched snacks for sustenance. Their
bodies are entirely at the mercy of the song: it plays over them,
through them, and so plays through me; for days after its words spill
out of me unbidden, no matter that they're sunk in cliche.

Those
few stolen minutes in front of it are every night I've huddled in the
dark listening to the same song(s) over and over: listening to Cat
Power so obsessively that the person I was staying with told me I'd
ruined What Would the Community Think? for them forever, listening to
Godspeed as though they could realign the stars, listening to
Interpol's NYC, a song that haunted me this holiday (“got to be
some more change in my life”), listening to that National album I
was reviewing for the Guardian stupefied by how out of sorts it left
me. On all those nights I was alone, but watching A Lot of Sorrow in
Chicago I was with my son – my funny little boy who likes his music
gentle and melancholy, has a penchant for Debussy, and was as
mesmerised by the film as me. I twined my arms around him, grateful
for this lifebuoy of love.

The
friend we stayed with in Chicago is a fascinating combination of
socially Democrat (that's how she votes, too) but economically
Republican (a committed believer in success rewarding hard work,
adherent to the American Dream). She's white Scottish, her husband
black Chicagoan, and their political engagement – both donated to
the Bernie Sanders campaign – gifted plenty of lively conversation
in their house about disappointment in Obama's leadership, lack of
belief in Sanders' revolutionary agenda, and the dire prospects of
the upcoming election. The thing that took me by surprise was their
admission that they get at least half of their political news from
watching the plethora of satirical programmes that screen in the US.
It's not a healthy state of affairs, they said, because what's needed
is cultural balance, a space in which people can actually speak
across the political divide, rather than hurling snark at each other.
But the thing is, I can't remember the last time I engaged with any
news-related programming on the BBC without wanting to punch people
for allowing so much inanity so much airspace. If we're going to ape
American programming, can we at least import the acute with the
vapid.

We
spent an evening watching John Oliver programmes, and one in
particular landed a horrible punch. It's a programme about drones, in
which Oliver shows a clip of a young teenager from Pakistan, talking
about the sky: grey days are good, he says, because that's when his
head feels clear of anxiety. Blue skies, by contrast, fill him with
fear. And people wonder how Muslim children might become
“radicalised”.

Peter
McMaster's blog was my holiday firefly, bringing flashes of natural
wonder to a fortnight of preying architecture and obsidious concrete.
I harbour a deep and quiet love for Peter and his work, and the
attempt at a different way of living, thinking, making art and
opening up to the world represented by Gold Pieces: Outer Hebrides
reminds me how much and why. The work takes the form of a two-week
cycle tour, marking in gold leaf upon land's edge a line to which, at
a conservative estimate, it's anticipated water will rise as
human-accelerated climate change affects sea levels. The gold is
ostentatious but the action anything but: it's a humble attempt to
reckon with environmental destruction, a lament for what might soon
not be, a movement towards a different sense of value. It's art made
for no money or purpose other than to notice, to acknowledge, to
witness – not what's before us, but what's unseen.

There's
a beautiful thing Peggy Phelan says in her forward to the Tim
Etchells book Certain Fragments, identifying “the essential nature
of witnessing itself: to continue a conversation that without your
intervention would cease”. Gold Pieces: Outer Hebrides continues a
conversation between human and land, one Peter still dominates
(painting rock with gold is “an unsympathetic defacing”), but in
a way that's diametric to the domination humans generally exert,
plundering earth's resources without care. His journey coincided
exactly with mine to the US, a piquant synchronicity: while he
cycled, camped, measured and gilded, I visited the Natural History
museum in Manhattan, Prospect Park zoo and the aquarium in Chicago,
and in each place fretted at the ethics of human-animal relations,
the cruelty required to give children a glimpse of wild nature, and
the extent to which cities diminish and even eliminate opportunity
for children to commune with a greater outdoors.

Peter's
blog posts continue another conversation: with the unseen audience.
When Phelan writes of the witness, she's thinking of course of the
audience, and I value that sentence so much for its suggestiveness
regarding criticism or writing about theatre. To me it presents a set
of open questions: is it enough to be a silent witness? Is
documentation essential if the conversation is to continue? Is it
possible to engage in the conversation as critic/critical
writer/whatever without overbearing? I don't know. But there was a
warmth for me in reading Peter's posts and recognising in the
scenario an echo of when I first met him, at Battersea Arts Centre,
when he was thinking similarly but in a different context about
masculinity, privilege, and solitude, environment and the spiritual
possibilities of a closer connection to nature. There is a longevity
and depth to our conversation, but also a scarcity, privately as well
as professionally: I rarely see him; I've seen much more of his work
than I've written about. And so how might it register if I stopped
being witness, if the conversation ceased? Would it matter?

It was
such an unexpected gift, a few days after I got home from Chicago, to
bump into Peter at Forest Fringe, where he was performing another
variation on the Gold Piece strand, a one-on-one called CommitmentCards. The work is exquisite in its shape and generosity: Peter
begins by offering tea, then asks what you're yet to say no to.
Gently he guides the conversation to an invitation to commit to
something, with him as witness. Work like this galvanises but also
disquiets me: it's so open that it inspires openness, and how much
must the artist then absorb of human anxiety or insecurity as
participants unburden? Megan Vaughan, writing about her interaction
with Commitment Cards, describes Peter as “a reassuring therapist”,
and Peter himself says in his blog post about the evening that he's
“not afraid of the idea of art-work being therapeutic” or “to
embrace the sensation of therapeutic experience”. I worry because
he doesn't have a therapist's training or safety mechanisms; that
these things aren't required for one human to give their ear to
another is a useful and inspiring thing to remember. As Peter says in
the blog: “I was moved by witnessing someone open up for the
benefit of both of us, for the creation of a bigger idea of
self-expression and compassionate communication being allowed to
exist in the world.”

I've
participated in one other Gold Piece with Peter and cherish it
precisely for its compassionate communication, achieved without
speaking at all. Based on the Japanese practice of kintsugi, the root
Gold Piece invites its participant to mend a piece of broken china,
gluing the pieces together then painting the cracks with gold dust.
As I did so, I felt Peter was silently forgiving me for every stupid
or thoughtless or mistaken thing I'd ever done. Kintsugi is a
philosophy as much as a practical art: it values the imperfect,
honours its scars. There's another thing I want to write about it
(especially since my brilliant friend Anna spotted a reference to
kintsugi in Beyonce's Lemonade) so I'll shut up now, but this strand
of Peter's work feels so important to have in the world – not just
in spite of its minimal reach, but because of it.

The
Rock'n'Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland is so bizarre: a small-town
museum in everything but pretensions, closer in spirit to those
ramshackle rooms devoted to dolls (Dunster), shells (Margate) or
fishing paraphernalia (Hastings) than the more grandiose cultural
houses that its architecture evokes. I loved it, the more so for
being ridiculous. Highlights: the Elvis display, which I wanted to
bring home to my mum; the drawings by Jimi Hendrix; the absurd
attempt to claim Cleveland as the epicentre of the pop universe; the
fact that the area devoted to the history of hip-hop is only slightly
bigger than the area devoted to outfits worn by Beyonce. Best of all
are the listening booths that people – locals, I'm guessing –
have claimed for karaoke, each one packed with friends singing at the
tops of their voices, not caring for the lack of closed doors. I
didn't buy any memorabilia because I'm going to make it instead: my
own version of a dress worn by Wanda Jackson, with a panel of gold
sequins down the front and red fringing down the sides, something to
fill a dance floor with flames.

There
are things generally known, at least by the people I surround myself
with. It's known, for instance, that humans are humans, regardless of
what country they're from or what colour skin they have. It's known
that humans have affected and accelerated ecological devastation.
It's known that story is vital to human culture and existence. Yuval
Noah Harari's Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind repeats these
known things, but places them in a depth of field (as he puts it,
scanning “millennia rather than centuries”) in ways that are
surprising and transformative. I'm prone to hyperbole I know, nothing
I say can be trusted, but I'm only two-fifths through and already I'm
changed by it. Or rather, he's brought to light and forced me to
acknowledge a whole lot of weak thinking in my brain and challenged
it in necessary ways.

It's
an incredibly depressing book, because page after page asserts the
same argument: that it's actually impossible to change the culture in
which we live, because the story of it is too tenacious, too
embedded. In no way is he saying that we are by nature neo-liberal
acolytes of the free market, but that all societies coalesce through
story, and the stories that dominate now have been in place for
thousands of years. This bit in particular is devastating: he's
talking about how difficult it would be to shift inter-subjective
imagined orders (the examples he gives are “the dollar, human
rights and the United States of America”) because to do so would
require “simultaneously chang[ing] the consciousness of billions of
people”, and to do that would require creating “an alternative
imagined order” even more powerful than the one you're attempting
to change. And so, he concludes: “There is no way out of the
imagined order. When we break down our prison walls and run towards
freedom, we are in fact running into the more spacious exercise yard
of a bigger prison.” The book is full of statements like that and
every one stings.

But.
BUT. He's affirmed my belief in feminism as the story with the most
potential to create change. His chapter on the patriarchal structure
is brilliant, because it comes right out and says that its
“universality and stability” is bewildering. He presents all the
key arguments for masculine supremacy and steadfastly exposes them as
arrant nonsense. There's a glorious butter-wouldn't-melt tone to this
writing: a swallowed amusement that no one will admit that the real
reason men dominate over women is that, in general, they are selfish
shitbags who chanced to seize an opportunity for power and never let
go. The feminist story struggles because it is disparate and scratchy
with argument and riddled with its own damaging hierarchies, but
there is hope in its tenacity, its adaptability, its ongoing
refusals, its compassionate communication (such a useful phrase). It
is the story in which I have most faith, and which gives me the most
strength.

He's
also made me feel better about the idea of living in a bubble. If the
imagined order at the macro scale is so impossible to change, why not
collectively imagine a new order on a micro scale and live within
that instead? At some level that's the ultimate in white middle-class
privilege, of course – the same line of argument that builds walls
and gated communities – but I don't, I hope, mean it that way. My
alternative world is populated by makers of story, theatre, art,
music and more, by feminists and activists, by people who don't
retreat from the bigger world but comment on it, rewrite it, work
against it. Each fuelling the other, giving each other purpose and
sustenance, and making life in that bigger system possible.

We
went back, me and my funny little son, to A Lot of Sorrow, because –
and, dozy as I am, I had to go to Chicago to find this out – the
film was also screening in London over the summer, as part of the
Ragnar Kjartansson exhibition at the Barbican. And then I had to go
back a third time, because there were chunks of the exhibition deemed
unsuitable for children (translation: he missed out on seeing a
hilarious film of a dog running round and round a swimming pool as a
woman swam lengths because it was next to a video of a couple having
sex), and because he was tired by the time we reached the Visitors
room and two minutes in there was 58 not enough.

I
realised something, watching A Lot of Sorrow that third time,
laughing as Kjartansson brought out burgers to the band, ribs
crushing and convulsing every time Matt Berninger rumbled the opening
line. There's a National lyric that's key to the whole exhibition,
but it's not from Sorrow, it's from Pink Rabbits, an absolute
humdinger in a song full of them:

You
didn't see me, I was falling apart

I was
a white girl in a crowd of white girls in the park

You
didn't see me, I was falling apart

I was
a television version of a person with a broken heart

A
television version of a person with a broken heart. Just writing it
gives me shivers.

Kjartansson
is fascinated by the interface of performance and personal, the
effects of external culture on internal emotions, the ways in which
people make stories which inform human behaviour, the Mobius strip of
mirror and mirrored. In the accompanying text for the multi-video
installation Scenes From Western Culture, he talks about the
pervasiveness of certain atmospheres, certain settings and moods,
wanting to jolt the brain into seeing them and maybe even resisting
them. By using repetition, he invites audiences to look harder, give
better attention: to seek out the difference between the television
version and the person.

But
it's the broken-hearted bit he's particularly incisive with. My son
had zero tolerance for God, in which Kjartansson dresses up as a Rat
Pack crooner and, accompanied by a cruise-liner swing band in a
pink-satin room, warbles the words “sorrow conquers happiness” on
repeat, and to be honest I didn't bother returning: the minute I saw
felt off-kilter compared with the fine balancing act of A Lot of
Sorrow and in particular The Visitors. There's such subtlety to the
permutations of melancholy in both of those: the performers wallow in
it, luxuriate in it, step away from it so easily that one person I
know complained on twitter that he “smelt the faint whiff of
vacuous”, saw only “irony on loop”; but there's also a fine and
solicitous appreciation of how intense and real and consuming
melancholy can be, how weird and jolting it is to feel like shit and
yet sometimes be capable of laughing or noticing beauty, how
excruciating it is to know somewhere deep down that the melancholy
that is so overwhelming might also be something you're performing (a
question Selina – waving hello again – asks of herself in Salt).
Nothing about A Lot of Sorrow, or The Visitors, or Take Me Here by
the Dishwasher felt ironic to me: there's a grain of playfulness in
them, even in Dishwaster a dash of cheerful stupidity (in this one,
Kjartansson has isolated three minutes of a soft-focus Mills &
Boon movie romance, in which a woman in a pink maribou dressing gown
has a tryst in the kitchen with a man in plumber's uniform, and
projects it on a wall while young male musicians loll about the
partially decorated gallery space strumming at guitars and droning
the dialogue from the film on repeat). But the questions these works
ask about how we see or feel or differentiate between the real, the
imagined, the fantasised, the performed, and how our ability to do so
is affected or conditioned by the art, film, theatre, music, TV and
books we consume, are serious and rigorous and give Kjartansson's
work its vitality.

Before
I saw Search Party's Growing Old With You at Forest Fringe, Andy Field texted a warning: “your heart is going to BREAK”. I braced
so strenuously that for most of it I was steel. But then Pete lay
down on a table and Jodie began to cover his body in salt. And that
was it. Snap.

Search
Party are just about my favourite theatre-makers in Britain
(inevitably that's a long list in which everyone is joint first). I
love them for Save Me, the semaphore show, in which they stand at
opposite ends of a public thoroughfare and communicate messages given
by passers-by to each other; with patience and grace and infinite
charm it makes visible the fragility of communication and the ways in
which people speak their truest selves to strangers. I especially
love them for My Son & Heir, the parenting show, in which they
speak so honestly of the strains and anxieties and competitiveness
and compromises and horrible absurdities of bringing up children that
I wept almost non-stop through it. And now I love them for Growing
Old With You, the all-of-our-lives show that they're going to make
new versions of every 10 years. At Forest they performed the first
instalment, and because it's already a few years old, it feels like
an act of nostalgia as much as documentation and assessment. The
scene in which Jodie covers Pete in salt felt, in the moment of
watching, overwhelming in its romance and longing: for youth to be
preserved, for the intensity and joy of falling in love and getting
married to never be lost. But on reflection, its complexity is
unfurling. I see the futility of that attempt to control time, and
also the limitation of it: where's the room for growth or change? I
see Pete lying still on the table like a corpse: that time is already
gone, fleeting as the life of a butterfly, and nothing can ever bring
it back. Above all, I see that while you can't argue with perfect
being, maybe you can't live a full life either.

There's
a great paragraph in a Guardian interview with Jenny Offill from last
year in which she talks about her admiration for visual artists who
“take an everyday thing and somehow make it, by accumulation, into
something much bigger”, and in particular her delight that British
reviewers of the book understood its humour, “all these moments
which are really meant to be kind of a joke about what it’s like to
be depressed”, which tells me she's probably a big fan of
Kjartansson. I'm finding her novel Dept. of Speculation painful to
read, because it's like she's poking needles into my brain. I had to
put it down for two days after this line: “Some women make it look
so easy, the way they cast ambition off like an expensive coat that
no longer fits.” The paragraph in which the narrator, a woman of
“crooked heart”, describes her happiest time as “a time you
were all alone, in the country, with no one wanting a thing from you,
not even love” made me choke. I feel exposed by it, the more so
because I so desperately wish I were smart and brave and gifted
enough to have written it and it's lacerating to reminded page after
page that I'm not.

The
thing is, I never make room for other kinds of writing in my life,
because I'm always writing about what other people make. Holding up a
mirror to the mirror, an endless loop, shoring fragments of feeling
and experience against my ruins.